Towards Sustainable Cities in India

Abstract

As India becomes more and more urban, sustainability will become an issue of increasing importance. But what constitutes sustainability and how it should be pursued as a policy goal is contested and shows considerable variation both in theory and practice. In the first part of this paper, different conceptual perspectives on urban sustainability are examined, namely, sustainability as understood from the Brundtland Commission’s Report, sustainable urban form as defined by planners, and the political economy approach of structuralist and post-structuralist scholars such as David Harvey. In the second part of the paper, urban sustainability is examined as policy in the Indian context, from the period before economic liberalization to the present and changes in policy are discussed. The current thrust on smart cities and gigantic urban-industrial corridors indicate that the scale of thinking about the urban has changed. The final section turns to the implications of the proposed policies in the context of land availability and sustainability. © 2018, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.